‘Prominent feminists, all of them Democrat supporters, dismissed her as a bit of junk sex.’ Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton at a party fundraiser in 1996.
Photograph: Dirck Halstead/Getty Images

It’s 2002 and I am in TK Maxx in Blackpool, trying to get away from the Blairite zeal of the Labour party conference, when I bump into a minister who is similarly unenamoured. “Bill Clinton is here,” he tells me. “They don’t know which woman to sit next to him at the fundraising dinner. Can’t be young. Or attractive. Because of … well, you know.” We do know. There was not a sexual encounter between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (whom he “did not have sexual relations with”) that we had not pored over years earlier.

Later that evening, in swooshed the known liar. But no one seemed to mind. I saw cynical hacks behave like daft groupies. Clinton schmoozed everyone, with the famous grabbing your hand and then moving up your elbow trick that Joe Klein had chronicled. He spoke off the cuff on global politics for an hour or so. Brilliant, obviously. There was no doubting his immense charm. Later that night, Clinton was seen wandering around in search of a Big Mac with a mate he had brought along for the ride: Kevin Spacey. Hilarious! Alastair Campbell was said to be there too, hanging on the coat-tails of the Hollywood glamour. Oh, the pulling power! Though in 2018 we might call Clinton and Spacey predators. Well, I would.

Actually, I couldn’t bear it even then. That Clinton was gifted and brilliant at winning elections was clear; that there was something sordid, entitled and morally bankrupt at the centre of the Clinton project was evident. I always thought there would be a reckoning. Some may say it came with Hillary Clinton losing the presidential election. Now at last, it may also be coming for him. Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern, buoyed up by the #MeToo movement, is finding a way to talk about what happened.

What #MeToo has done is made Lewinsky see the issue of consent differently

For Clinton to win public forgiveness as he appeared to do, a young woman’s life was ruined. He lied. He lied on camera, and then he had a prayer breakfast and suddenly all the stuff about the accusations of an affair that Hillary had denounced as “a rightwing conspiracy” turned to ash. Watching him, Hillary and Chelsea, faces frozen in pain, do a walk of shame towards a helicopter, I wondered how they could simply “move on”. But, though a tearful Clinton said he was “a broken spirit”, he still got standing ovations. It was Lewinsky’s life that stopped. At 24, in 1998, she was bundled into a hotel room by a group of FBI agents overseen by Ken Starr and told that unless she cooperated she could face 27 years in prison. They had tapes, made by her “friend” Linda Tripp. Clinton may have lied but, forced to give evidence to a grand jury, Lewinsky was fixed for ever in the public imagination.

‘Sometimes it takes a lifetime for an individual to name what has happened to them.’ Monica Lewinsky last September. Photograph: Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

She was destroyed: a blousy sexual opportunist, a blowjob queen, a girl with weight problems in Beverly Hills maxing out the credit cards on Rodeo Drive. Pushy, dumb, naive. The US academic and writer Camille Paglia said she offered herself up as a “dessert cart” to the president. This intern did a stupid a thing at 22, and the most stupid thing of all is perhaps that she wanted him to love her. She wanted to hug him so bad, “I could cry”, she wrote. She felt he had “a beautiful soul”. She wrote reams of romantic tosh, but she was pilloried as a woman with the wrong appetites. She was not a victim but a sluttish vamp.

After such a public shaming, she has reinvented herself over the years, partly as an anti-bullying campaigner. She was abandoned by those who should have supported her. Prominent feminists, all of them Democrat supporters, dismissed her as a bit of junk sex. Clinton liked his junk food; he was, as Hillary once said, “a hard dog to keep on the porch”. Lewinsky, this narcissistic, silly girl in a stained blue dress, was punished for his sins. She was disposable. Erica Jong and Maureen Dowd, among others, made that clear.

Now, though, we are finally in a different moment, and she has written perceptively of her experience, the aloneness of her life, in the light of the #MeToo movement. In Vanity Fair, she charts her own trauma and the collective trauma of 1998 that the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton meant for Americans, which she describes as not terror or war or recession but a shift that has altered her nation’s “capacity for mercy, measure and perspective”. The person that a nation might turn to for reassurance during a crisis – the president – was “absent”. He was also lying. This is worth noting every time some lie or other of the current president is exposed.

Lewinsky goes much deeper, however, and brilliantly challenges her own previous narrative. Four years ago, she still wrote of her relationship with Clinton as consensual. It was important for her to own her sexuality as a marker of her own agency, and she did not want to see herself as a victim. “Sure, my boss took advantage of me,” she wrote then. The abuse came after, in order to protect his power.

What #MeToo has done is made Lewinsky see the issue of consent differently. “I now see how problematic it was the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent.” What happened she now says, was “a gross of abuse of power”. Indeed he was 27 years older than her, and the most powerful man on the planet.

Why now does this matter? Because consent matters. Because #MeToo matters, and because Trump is in the White House with another woman who will stand by her man. This time it’s his daughter, Ivanka, who says it is “inappropriate to ask a daughter if she believes the accusers of her father when he’s affirmatively stated there’s no truth to it”. Trump, of course, was happy enough to use women who had accused Clinton of sexual harassment as part of his election campaign. On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton was asked about Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey. Elsewhere, she had said women should be believed.

The pact made by Hillary and Bill was one that is instinctively repulsive to me, not because I care about fidelity but because I care about class. Certain kinds of women are fair game for harassment while others are not. Likewise, certain kinds of men who are on “our side” are let off with being laddy, gropey, handsy, rapey – because, hell knows, the other lot are worse. A group called LabourToo has submitted a dossier to the party’s leadership alleging 43 incidents of sexual harassment including groping and rape within the party.

Yet we end up shocked that aid workers and the husband of a murdered MP might have behaved “inappropriately” with women. Sexual harassment is the rule, but the culture treats it as the exception. #MeToo shatters this illusion. This is its value.

Monica Lewinsky says Bill Clinton affair was ‘gross abuse of power’

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Here we have a woman portrayed as a predator taking back some power. This matters because so much of what is happening now is to do with the undercurrent of lies and exploitation that she was part of. Clinton exploited this woman. Berlusconi made it a virtue to exploit other women.Trump didn’t come from nowhere, yet we ask how we can have a man who talks of pussy-grabbing in the White House.

Lewinsky perceptively calls that year (1998) a year of shame and spectacle. She wonders if we have properly processed it. What we cannot process, we are destined to relive. How, we repeatedly still ask, do powerful men get away with abusing others for so long? Surely someone knew. Yes, we all knew. Here is the undertow that pulls us down. But then someone manages to swim towards the light. Away from shame. Sometimes it takes a lifetime for an individual to actually name what has happened to them. It is a remarkable thing that Lewinsky’s appetite turns out to be for something she was never given at the time: truth and understanding.